3

After twelve even those within could tell the sun had risen very high. The rusty painted fan above was turned on, but it traveled with such a tired slowness that it made more noise than air and made the Traffic Control Office uncomfortable in a strange indeterminate way. It was not the heat alone or the inside wetness alone. And it was not the use¬ less sounds of the fan mixing with the usual rattle of the little Morse machines. It was the combination that created the sense of a confusion which it would be impossible to fix and against which it would be merely foolish to protest. The wetness within came partly from the sea which was only a little way away. Sometimes it was possible to taste very clearly the salt that had been eating the walls and the paint on them, if one cared to run one's hand down the dripping surfaces and taste the sticky mess. Partly, too, the wetness came from people, everybody who worked in the office. Everybody seemed to sweat a lot, not from the exertion of their jobs, but from some kind of inner struggle that was always going on. So the sea salt and the sweat together and the fan above made this stewy atmosphere in which the suffering sleepers came and worked and went dumbly back afterward to homes diey had earlier fled. There was really no doubt that it was like that in all their homes, everywhere save for those who had found in themselves the hardness for the upward climb. And he was not one of those.

24 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

At half past twelve the lines had cleared as usual. Only a few goods trains would be coming down, and there was nothing going up with which they could possibly collide. It was the time for sending self-pitying jokes along the Morse wire to the railwaymen shunted onto some dead siding where they could get rich in gift livestock and crops and eat their hearts out with the suicidal desire to get back to the warm center. Until the old 1:50 train started up to bring Tarkwa gold and Aboso manganese to the waiting Greek ships in the harbor, this would be the time of peace.

The man sent a message to whoever was in the Insu Siding office now. "Handing over till two."

A friendly rattle answered him. At first it was meaningless, just a good musical rhythm. When it resolved itself, it said, "Yes, lunchtime."

Without thinking of what he was saying, the man tapped out, "No food."

Insu Siding answered, "Plenty here."

And a conversation had begun.

"Lucky."

"Come. Transfer. Easy."

"Can't."

"Why?"

"Secret."

"Family?"

"Secret."

The rattle came again from Insu Siding, this time not so irreverent, not so joyful and musical, but a soft, sympathetic signing off, as if the other one were trying to say he did not know but he could understand. The man answered with a short rattle, looked at the machine with a wondering thought about how close people sometimes come to opening up their

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 25

sores for others to see, and then he called to the man at the ma¬ chine on his left, "Over to you."

The reply, as usual, came automatically, "All correct."

He moved slowly downstairs, past the banister and the light bulb under all the cobwebs. At the bottom, when he reached the entrance, he went out into the street with the sun shining all over it and the dust rising with the heat waves on it. He did it more out of habit than anything else, and before he got close enough to pick the words out of the noise of the sellers and the buyers of food, he turned left and walked down the right side of the road, down toward the harbor.

At a time like this, when the month was so far gone and all there was was the half-life of Passion Week, lunchtime was not a time to refresh oneself. Unless, of course, one chose to join the increasing numbers who had decided they were so deep in despair that there was nothing worse to fear in life. These were the men who had finally, and so early, so surpris¬ ingly early, seen enough of something in their own lives and in the lives around them to convince them of the final futility of efforts to break the mean monthly cycle of debt and bor¬ rowing, borrowing and debt. Nothing was left beyond the necessity of digging oneself deeper and deeper into holes in which there could never be anything like life. But perhaps the living dead could take some solace in the half-thought that there were so many others dead in life with them. So many, so frighteningly many, that maybe in the end even the efforts one made not to join them resulted only in another, more frus¬ trating kind of living death.

Thinking of the endless round that shrinks a man to some¬ thing less than the size and the meaning of little short-lived flying ants on rainy nights, the man followed the line of the

26 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

hard steel tracks where they curved out and away from inside the loco yard and straightened out ahead for the melancholy piercing push into the interior of the land. On the gravel bed beneath the metal, the mixture of fallen ashes and stray lumps of engine coal and steamed grease raised somewhere in the re¬ gion of his throat the overwarm stench of the despair and the defeat of a domestic kitchen well used, its whole atmosphere made up of lingering tongues of the humiliating smoke of all those many yesterdays. Out ahead, however, the tracks drove straight in clean shiny lines and the air above the steel shook with the power of the sun until all the afternoon things seen through the air seemed fluid and not solid anymore. The sour¬ ness that had been gathering in his mouth went imperceptibly away until quite suddenly all he was aware of was the exceed¬ ingly sharp clarity of vision and the clean taste that comes with the successful defiance of hunger. It was not painful watching the little scratched-out farms of Northern migrant laborers slide slowly past. Only a little effort, scarcely noticeable, was required to keep the footsteps landing on the warm crossties. In the ditch running along the left track, the unconquerable filth was beginning to cake together in places, though under¬ neath it all some water still managed to flow along. Nothing oppressed him as he walked along now, and even the slight giddiness accompanying the clarity of his starved vision was buried way beneath the unaccustomed happy lightness.

Some way out, the tracks went over a small ridge of concrete and cement, and the mud sliming alongside dipped under¬ neath. The man crossed the bridge, then turned at the end and sat on the flanking cement embankment on the right. The bridge itself must have been built solidly enough, but the embankments must have been something in the nature of an afterthought. Where he sat on the right, a hunk of

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 27

heavy cement had parted from the whole and fallen leaning into the thick stream coming out from under the bridge and formed a kind of dam. Behind it, all the filth seemed to have got caught for a hanging moment, so that the water escaping through a gap made by the little dam and the far side of the ditch had a cleanness which had nothing to do with the thing it came out from. Even from the small height of the dam, the water hit the bottom of the ditch with sufficient force to eat away the soft soil down to the harder stuff beneath, exposing a bottom of smooth pebbles with the clear water now flowing over it. How long-lasting the clearness? Far out, toward the mouth of the small stream and the sea, he could see the water already aging into the mud of its beginnings. He drew back his gaze and was satisfied with the clearness before the inevi¬ table muddying. It was the satisfaction of a quiet attraction, not at all like the ambiguous disturbing tumult within awak¬ ened by the gleam. And yet here undoubtedly was some¬ thing close enough to the gleam, this clearness, this beautiful freedom from dirt. Somehow, there seemed to be a purity and a peace here which the gleam could never bring.

From the direction of the yard the wailing whistle of an old steam engine came down the lines and disappeared with its disturbing slowness into the shimmering distance behind him. The sound brought with it a vague taste of sorrow which rapidly grew until the man was asking himself questions that were no longer new to him but to which he had no hope of finding any answer, so insubstantial was the thing they strained to grasp. Why, between here and there, was it neces¬ sary that there should be a connection ? Why was it that just the solitary whistle of a train about to disappear down the deep distances of the forest should scatter in the air so much of the feeling of permanent sorrow? To the clarity of his famished

28 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

vision had been added a sharp sadness as he rose ready to re¬ turn. The dryness in his nostrils persisted, and there was no moisture either in his mouth or in his eyes. The thought of food now brought with it a picture of its eating and its spew¬ ing out, of its beginnings and endings, so that no desire arose ,asking to be controlled. He walked quietly back the way he had come, looking at all the things he had seen on his way out¬ ward with the same clear vision, walking steadily back along the lines, into the dusty road and past the remnants of the groups of workers out for the afternoon break, and it was not until he went in and began again the climb up into the Control Office that the darkness of the place itself misted over the sharp¬ ness of everything he saw.

With the climb up into the office, thoughts that might have struck desperation into him on other days came with a sur¬ prising gentleness. The grown man eats his guts, so, having started, he might as well make the killing effort now and re¬ lax afterward, if that would be possible. So when he opened the door into the Control Office he did not go directly to his own place at the long table with the line diagrams up in front of it; he went instead past the table to the end of the office and stood waiting in front of the counter there while the small man behind it read and reread with a crucified frown the day's four little frames of "Garth." Showing no signs of having fi¬ nally fathomed the mystery of the strip, the little man just gave up and blinked up at the waiting man. His nostrils every few seconds accomplished an involuntary sideways twitch which made his attempts to adopt an air of importance not just ridic¬ ulous but actually irritating in the special way in which the efforts of a Ghanaian struggling to talk like some Englishman are irritating.

"Erm, wort cin I dew for yew?" Frantic, rapid, singsong de-

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 29

livery, air of self-congratulation after a brilliant speech, twitch¬ ing nose, the blind fool.

"Slip." Idiot's face a mask of puzzlement; what on earth is there to feel puzzled about?

"Eouvatime sleps, yew mean?" As if any other slips could have been meant. Strain of the accent produces a double twitch this time; after this the whole face collapses in an equally in¬ voluntary spell of relaxation.

"Yes, overtime slips."

Now the little man produces a smile of intimate familiarity. From a drawer to his right he brings out the pad of slips. "Is a joke," he says. The man is thankful that his accent is now relaxed and natural, but he gives no answer. As he fills out the slip and signs it, the little man volunteers, "Money swine!" Still no answer. The little man retreats into his official posi¬ tion. "Seouw. Nine eouclock."

"Seven o'clock."

The little man squints dramatically at the slip. "Eouw. Yes, 7 p.m. I see, I see."

The man watched silently as the little man put the slip in with the others, then he turned and walked back to his seat at the long control table. The man at his left did not have to say anything. Nothing much had happened.

He sat down facing the huge chart with all the lines and the millipede names of slow stations alongside them. Nothing much had happened. Nothing much would happen. The traffic of the afternoon was as usual very slow and very sparse. Perhaps from some side station somewhere near a mine, a quiet line of open wagons with cracked boards held together with rusty plates and rivets would slide along the hot rails to a languid stop some forgotten place, to wait for other slow days when it would all get shunted back and down to the sea far

30 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

away. After a while it was possible not to be aware of the noises of the fan. On the Morse machine there was a long roll that could only raise thoughts of people going irretrievably crazy at the long end of the telegraph. Maybe also the famous rattle of men preparing to die. In a while, when it was no longer possible to ignore the rattle, the man rapped back once for silence, then tapped out the message, "Shut up."

The roll came again, defiantly insistent. The maniac at the end of the line had grown indignant. Another rap. Short si¬ lence. Then the man asks in half-conciliation, "Who be you?"

A roll now, very long and very senseless. But at the very end it carries a signature, "Obuasi."

That at least was something, and should deserve a reply.

The man held the Morse knob again, lightly. "Hello."

With amazing speed an answer comes back, this time en¬ tirely coherent, decipherable at the last. "Why do we agree to go on like this?" Then again the rattle.

The question was repeated several times, alternating with long unanswered rolls on the machine. To stop himself from cutting off the sound in anger the man turned and just watched the fan, and it seemed with every turn that the fan had stopped finally; only just then another feeble, useless movement would happen and the blades would be drawn through another arc. Only a long hour later did the noise finally stop —4:30 p.m.

With a hurry that was still instinctive after so many years of disappointment and so much knowledge of futility, the clerks put away the things they called work and made for the door. What did they think they were hurrying to? But perhaps it must be said that at the moment they did not really care about having nothing worth rushing to. All they knew was what they were fleeing.

"Good night."

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 3i

"Good night."

"Bye-bye-o."

"Bye-o."

It was a terrible truth but the oppressiveness of the office was not so heavy with the others gone. It was there still, but there were not all those faces and thick bodies confirming it, and it was easier to think of it, to have the mind get hold of it as if it could someday be conquered. The world was once again not here, not present with its terrible closeness, but some¬ thing outside. Why was it such a strong and ancient thought, that there was nothing in loneliness but pain ?

The Morse rattled off quiet details of coming trains, and a message came down the telephone line all the way from Konongo.

"Ferguson, 5:21 mine train nine minutes late to Kansawora."

"Present position, please ?"

"Nsuta B, approaching A."

"Thank you."

"Thank you."

The comforting loneliness again. The man moved the little green way flags down the lines on the big wall chart.

"Ferguson, 5:21 thirteen minutes late."

". . . minutes late."

In through the door came a belly swathed in \ente cloth. The feet beneath the belly dragged themselves and the mass above in little arcs, getting caught in angular ends of heavy cloth. Sandals made of thick leather, encrusted with too many tufts and useless knobs, but then the wearer's pride had some¬ thing to do with tassels. The visitor looked around and saw no one except the man.

"Good even," the visitor shouted, moving forward.

"Evening."

32 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

The visitor's mouth was a wolf shape and when he spoke the reason appeared. Children had a name for such teeth. Nephews, they called these teeth which come in rows, a sec¬ ond and even a third set pushing impatiently out against the first. The man reached over to his right and switched on the light immediately above himself and turned squarely to face the visitor.

"I am looking for the allocations clerk," the vistor said. His wolf mouth was agape in a gesture that must have been meant for a smile, a thing that was totally unnecessary and irritating.

"Which one?"

"Which one?" In his puzzlement the visitor made an in¬ voluntary movement to close his snout. But the lip flesh, though abundant, proved insufficient and hung around the generations of teeth, vainly straining to meet over them.

"There are two clerks. One for time, one for wagon space."

"Aha, I understand now." The visitor smiled again. "Wag¬ ons. It's wagons I have come to talk about."

"Space allocation. You should come earlier in the day, though. In this office also the clerks go home at four-thirty."

"Oh, I know," the teeth said. "I know, but I thought he would stay after work."

"Had you fixed a time with him?"

"Actually, no. But someone told me this was about the right time to come."

"To come for what?" the man asked.

The flesh of the snout accomplished a grotesque retreat from the teeth, and the visitor hesitated, thinking of a way to put what he was about to say.

"Actually," he said at last, "actually, it is a bit private." His eyes ranged over the chart behind the man. He gathered up the folds of his \ente cloth in the angle of his right arm and

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 33

flung the whole collected heap onto his shoulder. His lips worked forward and back a couple of times over his tortured gums. Then he seemed to make up his mind about the thing that was making him so restless.

"Brother," the many teeth said, "brother, you also can help me."

"Me ?" The man had not expected this.

"Yes, brother," the visitor said. "And I will make you know that you have really helped me." The lips had this habit of leaving in their wake bubbles and lines of filmy saliva whose yellow color was not all from the bulb above.

"I am not the booking clerk," the man said. "The booking clerk has gone home."

"I know, brother, I know." The visitor no longer looked past the man at the chart behind him on the wall. Now he was look¬ ing almost directly into his eyes. On his face was a strained ex¬ pression produced partly by his desire to penetrate the man's incomprehension, partly by the structure of the face itself.

"He will be in tomorrow morning."

The visitor cleared his throat in exasperation. "Brother," he asked, "why are you making everything so difficult for me ?"

The outburst took the man completely by surprise, so that what he said next came out entirely by itself. "Now what have I done?" The man saw the visitor draw closer.

"I should be asking you that question," the visitor said. "I should be asking you people in this office what have I done to you. Why do you treat me this way?" The man just stared, and was lost completely in his surprise at the visitor's words and his fascination with his teeth. Listening to the words re¬ quired a real effort now. "You know me," the teeth said ag¬ gressively. "You know my name."

"I don't know your name," the man said quietly. The visi-

34 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

tor looked as if he had been getting ready to say something or other, but had been struck dumb by incredulity. He looked at the man with eyes that were now too steady and smiled a smile that had in it the tolerant sourness of unbelief.

"Amankwa," the visitor said at last. "They call me Amankwa. I cut timber. Contractor."

"If you can come back tomorrow . . ." the man was saying. But now the sick conciliatory smile had receded from the visi¬ tor's face and in its place there was the impotent resentment of a cheated man.

"My friend," he said, "all joke aside. Come with me inside the forest and I will show you something to make you weep. Do you know, I cut my timber a long time ago and it is still waiting in the forest. Half of it will be rotten soon. Why do you have to treat me like that ? What do you want ?"

"I am sorry," the man answered, "but I have nothing to do with allocations."

"I am not a child, my friend. If you work in the same office you can eat from the same bowl. What do you mean to tell me?"

"I have my job; the booking clerk has his job. I don't inter¬ fere with him."

"Why not? Why not?" The visitor spoke with open heat. "You think my timber should rot in the forest? Look, they tell me all the time, no wagons, no space. But many times I see wagons coming down here, carrying nothing but stones. Some¬ times empty, empty, my good friend, empty. Is that how to do it?"

"If you want to talk to someone higher up . . ."

"My friend," the visitor said, "don't joke with me. I need to talk to you."

"I tell you I have nothing to do with bookings."

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 35

"You can see that clerk for me." The visitor looked suspi¬ ciously toward the door, then plunged his left arm underneath his \ente folds. When the arm emerged it was clutching a dark brown leather wallet. The wallet was not fat. The man looked steadily at the visitor. The visitor's gaze was bent, his eyes looking in the wallet while thick lingers fumbled inside. Then the lingers brought out two carefully held-out notes, two green tens. The man said nothing. The visitor put the ten- cedi notes under a stone paperweight on the table behind the man, to his right. The visitor drew his hand back from the ta¬ ble and the notes and stood staring at the man in front of him. The man said nothing.

"Take it," the visitor said. "One for you, one for him."

"Why should I?"

The look on the visitor's face made it plain that to this kind of question no sane man would give an answer. But then sud¬ denly the visitor's expression changed, and he laughed a laugh that came out too high, like a woman's or a child's.

"You are a funny man, you this man," he said. "You think I am a fool to be giving you just ten cedis?" Again the high laugh. "Is nothing. I know ten is nothing. So, my friend, what do you drink?"

The man looked levelly at the visitor and gave his answer. "Water."

This time the visitor bent double and his laugh was wild and forced and he took a few short steps across the floor hold¬ ing his belly as if it were about to burst with the pressure of his laughter. Then abruptly he straightened up and stopped in front of the man with a solemn look on his face, and the look had something of pain in it.

"I beg you, let us stop joking now," the visitor said. "They are waiting for me and I must go. A man is a man. I tell you

36 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

what I will do. Take that one for yourself and give the other one to your friend. I myself will find some fine drink for you. Take it. Take it, my friend."

The man looked at the face before him, pleading with the words of millions and the voice of ages, and he felt lonely in the way only a man condemned by all things around him can ever feel lonely. "I will not take it," he said, too quietly, per¬ haps.

The visitor did not touch his money. He did not even look at it. He only said, "Look, I mean it. I offer you three times. Is good money."

"I know."

"Then take it."

"No." The man shook his head very gently, but there was a finality in the gesture which even the visitor could no longer mistake.

"You refuse?"

"Yes."

The frown on the visitor's face made it impossible to judge whether the grimace was one of contempt or of self-pity. His hand touched the money lying on the table and stopped there.

"But why?" he shouted, "why do you treat me so? What have I done against you? Tell me, what have I done?"

There was nothing the man could say now. He watched silently as the visitor took the two notes and slipped them back into the dark wallet.

"But what is wrong ?" the visitor asked again.

"Wrong?"

"Yes, my friend. Why do you behave like that?"

"I don't know," the man said.

"I say my timber is rotting in the forest. You don't believe

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 37

"I think I believe you."

"Then what is this?" The visitor was angry now, in the spe¬ cial way the upright have of being angry with perverse people. He searched around under his folds of \ente cloth and stuck the wallet in some hidden pocket. Then, saying not a word of farewell to the man at the table, he strode to the door, opened it angrily and disappeared behind it. The man was left alone with thoughts of the easy slide and how everything said there was something miserable, something unspeakably dishonest about a man who refused to take and to give what everyone around was busy taking and giving: something un¬ natural, something very cruel, something that was criminal, for who but a criminal could ever be left with such a feeling of loneliness ?

He heard the door open again but did not look up. Around this time the night sweeper would come and do his work. Then a hand came to rest confidentially on his left shoulder, and he became aware of the rich must of \ente cloth. He turned.

"You are not angry with me?" Once more the visitor's sick smile.

"Should I be?"

"No." The visitor laughed low and relaxedly now. "To¬ morrow, what will you say to the other man?"

"Nothing."

"Please don't be annoyed." Kente folds slipping down, be¬ ing pushed up over shoulder again. "You see, I don't want to do anything bad. But I want to know what he wants. Only what he wants. I can give him what he wants."

"To make a booking, you have to come during working hours."

"All right, all right," the visitor said. "But you also know

38 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

that everybody prospers from the work he does, no? Every¬ body prospers from the job he does."

"Tomorrow morning."

"So you won't say anything? Don't be annoyed. I was not tricking you."

The door opened and the visitor turned sharply to look at the intruder. But the door just stayed open and no one seemed about to enter the office. The visitor could not take his eyes off the door. A bent bucket swung through the open door, and behind it came a small man lugging a brush and a mop with a handle taller than himself.

"Who is that?" The visitor asked that question before he could catch himself, and the man smiled at it.

"The sweeper. He cleans this place."

The visitor looked with hostility at the newcomer and cleared his throat. "I must go now," he said. "They are wait¬ ing for me." He walked past the sweeper and went out.

The sweeper dragged his goods across the floor. His walk was slow and dazed, and he was tired at the beginning of his night. The night was the end of a long day filled with two jobs pieced together, and the night cleaning job was number three. So even at the beginning of the night the sweeper was tired and almost walking in his sleep.

"Good evening, sah," said this sleepwalker with a smile straight from the dead.

"Good evening, Atia."

But the sleepwalker sweeper already had his head bent down and was beginning to drag his brush on the long walk from corner to corner, and he did not hear the answering greeting. No matter. A lost man from distances far off caught in a strange dance on the lower stair. Someone so much worse off. Christ! Someone actually worse off.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 39

After a while the soggy sound of the wet mop replaced the soft drag of the brush and the sudden knocks as it hit the cor¬ ners. Behind, the fan continued its languid turning and the light began again to weaken into an orange yellow color and then swrell into whiteness in long, slow waves of time. A few minutes before seven the night relief came in. He was a new man just out of Secondary, very young, and he was whistling in his cheerful mood this terrible night. No doubt, being only new, he was calculating in his undisappointed mind that he would stay here only a short while and like a free man fly off to something closer to his soul. What in his breeziness he had yet to know was this: that his dream was not his alone, that everyone before him had crawled with hope along the same unending path, dreaming of future days when they would crawl no longer but run if they wanted to run, and fly if the spirit moved them. But along the streets, those who can soon learn to recognize in ordinary faces beings whom the spirit has moved, but who cannot follow where it beckons, so heavy are the small, ordinary days of the time. The unwary freedom of the young man and the realization that it was time to go filled the man with an undefined fear of things that had not yet come. The young man greeted him happily.

"Evening," the man replied. He got off the chair. "You know what to do, of course. Use the telephone."

"Okay."

"Nothing much tonight. Slack time all along the line. The night trains are listed." The man began to walk toward the door.

"Good night," the young man shouted after him.

"Good night."

At the door the sleepwalker sweeper was also about to leave. He put his load down and held the door open for the man,

4o The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

smiling again and giving a final greeting. The man began to descend the stairs. In his tiredness it did not matter that his thumb and the balls of his fingertips were being clammily caressed by the caked accretions on the banister. As he went down a shadow rose menacingly up the bottom wall to meet him, and it was his own.